Acoustic detection has been proposed for condition monitoring in industrial process applications. In these conventional applications, a number of acoustic sensors can be placed on the outside wall of the vessel to detect acoustic emission generated by different components. The acoustic emissions can be processed to generate an acoustic profile, which may be used to detect the existence of an acoustic anomaly, caused by a leak, change in process node, change in the phase of a component, or other characteristics of the industrial process as desired. These applications have limitations, however, in an ability to generate images of the internal volume of the vessel from the acoustic emissions detected by the sensors. Image generation can also be constrained by the environmental and structural characteristic of the industrial process and vessel. In some configurations, the vessel can include a thick outer wall, which greatly limits and/or prevents the monitoring of the process inside the vessel.
For example a coking operation is a refining technique for generating oil and petroleum products from non-uniform residual feedstocks. In a delayed coking operation, a residual oil feed is heated in a furnace with multiple parallel passes to its thermal cracking temperature. The heating cracks the heavy, long chain hydrocarbon molecules of the residual oil into coker gas oil and petroleum coke.
The coking process can present a number of undesired conditions. One such condition involves the formation of hot-spots. A hot-spot is typically an egg-shaped volume of coke on the order of a few feet in diameter, which has a hard, non-porous shell. The hot-spot can retain heat because water does not penetrate the shell during a quenching process. During a quenching process, water is introduced into the vessel to cool the coke material. That is, when the coking vessel is substantially filled with solidified coke, the vessel is steamed to further reduce hydrocarbon content of the petroleum coke. In a next step, the material in the vessel is cooled by quenching with water. The top and bottom heads of the coke drum are removed, and the solid petroleum coke is then cut from the coke drum with a high pressure water drill. When the water drill hits a hot-spot, thermal energy can be released through the opening at the top of the vessel.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,517,537 A describes an acoustic leak detection system that maps acoustic noise in a three-dimensional acoustic noise field for leak detection. Acoustic sensors are coupled to the external vessel walls of a steam generator and chemical sensors are placed inside the vessel to monitor the hydrogen content of liquid sodium and a cover gas. The externally mounted sensors monitor the acoustic pressure within the steam generator vessel by measuring the wall motion resulting from the impact of acoustic pressure waves. The system extracts acoustic pressure waves that result from a leak (e.g., due to a sodium-water reaction) inside the vessel. This detection scheme is limited to locating a leak in the absence of large background noise and cannot be used to image an internal volume of the vessel.
US 2007/0038393 A1 discloses a system that proposes monitoring the status of a cutting tool and the level of coke in a drum during a delayed decoker unit operation. Plural sensors are coupled in vertical and horizontal orientations to a component of the coker unit, such as outside the drum, on the drill stem, a fluid line, and/or a fluid pump. The data collected by the sensors are output the data to a computer. When the drum is off-line, the drill is in boring mode, and water is ejected from high pressure nozzles to cut a bore hole through solid coke in the drum, each sensor measures vibrations produced because of the process. The collected data from each sensor can be amplified, calibrated, and/or transformed using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). The resulting wave can be used to create a fingerprint of the boring process, and when the coking process is operational, the data collected by each sensor can be analyzed to monitor the cutting tool and/or determine the mode, such as ramping, cutting, and drilling, for example. While this system can monitor the coke levels inside a coke drum and detect a position of the drill, it does also not provide a capability to image the coking process within the drum.
Each of the prior art disclosures are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety.
Given the known art there is a need for a system, method, and arrangement that can image the inner volume of a vessel associated with an industrial process and detect the physical and chemical features of a medium in the vessel, which is acted on by the industrial process.